Low Turnout Spurs Moves to Alter School Voting

The low voter turnout in last week's citywide school election—a little less than 10 per cent of all those eligible voted—has spurred new moves for a re‐examination of a reexamination of the process for selecting community school board members.

Bea Dolen, executive director of the city's Board of Elections, yesterday described the school election as “sick” and “a horrible waste of money and time.” Mrs. Dolen released revised figures for the voter turnout on May 6—284,128 voters, or 9.8 per cent of the total eligible. An earlier estimate had placed the turnout at 9.2 per cent.

Mrs. Dolen suggested that the present voting system of proportional representation, involving a complicated procedure with paper ballots, should be replaced with direct elections using voting machines.

She declared that proportional vote actually might have kept minority voters from casting ballots, thus defeating its intended purpose of assuring them representation on the boards.

The final election returns were also announced yesterday for Districts 2 and 3 in Manhattan. The outcome in the 30 other decentralized districts had been released previously. In District 2, a slate backed by the United Federation of Teachers won five of the nine board seats. But in District 3, union‐endorsed candidates captured only four seats.

According to an unofficial tally, U.F.T.‐backed candidates won 192 board seats, or twothirds of the 28S seats—nine on each district board—that were at stake in the election. Teacher ‐ union ‐ backed candidates will be in the majority on 27 of the 32 local boards.

The new boards will begin their two‐year terms on July 1. Local board members receive no salaries.

Nearly a third of the candidates endorsed by the teachers union were also endorsed by either the newly formed Alliance for Children or District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employes. By and large, however, the two organizations backed candidates opposing the U.F.T. choices.

Albert Shanker, the president of the U.F.T., said that his union had done even better than the figures indicated. In some districts, he said, some of the successful candidates who were elected without U.F.T. endorsement “are people who are not opponents of the union and will work with us on many matters.”

Mr. Shanker said he was unhappy with the voter turnout in general.

“We originally said that if you want to encourage greater participation, the school‐board elections should be held together with the regular elections,” Mr. Shanker said. “But that Idea did not get much support from the politicians.”

Mr. Shanker said that the union had warned that the pressent election method — even though it worked to the union's advantage—made it possible for small, well ‐ organized groups to dominate a district election or for a nonrepresentative board to be elected.

“If the Mayor or the central Board of Education appointed the members, the local boards essentially would be more representative,” Mr. Shanker said.

Mrs. Dolen, in her comments, said that in District 16 in Brooklyn, where 1,214 valid votes were cast, a winning candidate needed only 122 votes.

“How can anyone who gets 122 votes claim to represent the community?” she asked. District 16 covers the BedfordStuyvesant section.

David Seeley, who headed the Alliance for Children during the campaign, expressed his “renewed disgust” at the present method of selecting school boards in the city.

Very few people, he said, knew the issues or the candidates, the election system itself was confusing, and “the whole business is a perfect setup for corruption and domination by special interests and political clubs.”

Last week's voter participation contrasted with a turnout of 10.4 per cent in 1973 and 13.9 per cent in 1970, when the first election was held under the school‐decentralization law. Even the 1970 figure was regarded as disappointing at the time.

While these turnouts are lower than those recorded in some suburban communities in the metropolitan area, there voters usually pass on the school budget — and their school tax rate—at the same time.

Some people have also contended that the school voter (turnout in the city, while disappointing in terms of original expectations, should more realistically be judged in the light of citizen participation in other elections in the city. They note that in some Democratic and Republican primaries here the turnout has been less than 25 per cent.

The following are the results of the last two district races, as announced yesterday by Election Machine Service, Inc., which counted the ballots under a contract from the Board of Elections:

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A version of this archives appears in print on May 14, 1975, on Page 33 of the New York edition with the headline: Low Turnout Spurs Moves to Alter School Voting. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe